


Malaria

by taylor_tut



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Malaria, Sick Character, Sick Hawkeye, Sickfic, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 11:23:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17938778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: Hawkeye gets sick with an illness that no one knew he was at risk for until Radar figures it out.





	Malaria

Hawkeye threw his cards into the center of the table again without so much as looking at them, seemingly unaware of just how irritated the rest of the card game group was becoming with that action. 

“I fold,” he said as if he hadn’t done the same thing the last four times in a row. 

“Of course you do,” Charles rolled his eyes. He reached across the table for Hawkeye’s cards, effectively ruining the game for everyone else and eliciting distraught cries from those who still wanted to play. Pierce’s eyes were already closed as he leaned against his hand, his elbow resting on the table propped up against BJ for support. Charles turned the cards toward the group irritably. 

“A perfectly playable hand, just as I suspected,” he revealed, but it didn’t seem to bother Hawkeye one bit.

“I already said I don’t want to play,” he reiterated. “You were the ones who needed an even number of players.” Margaret had learned some complicated partnership-based card game from a Korean soldier and had been dying to try it out, so when Hawkeye had decided that he’d wanted to skip the games and go straight to bed after surgery, they’d given him grief about it until he’d finally caved. At first, he’d made a good effort, but as the night had dragged on, he was becoming so tired that it was hard to even focus on the cards.

“Yesterday, you were just as eager to try out a new game as anyone,” Margaret pointed out, but where normally Hawkeye would cave and perk up no matter how tired he was, now, he barely moved. There was a heaviness to his posture that was different from just normal exhaustion, something that told BJ that he wasn’t going to come around and enjoy himself, not tonight. 

“Maybe we should just save this game for another night,” he suggested. “We can just switch to poker for now.” 

“Aw, but I didn’t bring any money,” Radar objected, a response that was met with agreement from the others. 

Hawkeye reached into his pocket and threw a few dollars into the center of the table before standing to leave, feeling his muscles aching as he did so. 

“I’ll purchase my freedom. You can use it to play.”

Klinger laughed. “Really, Hawkeye? You’re going to buy yourself out?” 

“I have to be in post-op in five hours, so yes,” he replied, rolling his neck from side to side to try to alleviate the headache that was beginning to build. Before anyone could say anything further to him, he’d already turned from the table and was on his way back to the Swamp. The others shrugged their shoulders but didn’t chase after him. 

 

Five hours later, Hawkeye woke up for his shift, immediately wishing that he could just wake BJ or Charles to work it instead so he could continue sleeping. Despite that he hadn’t been drinking with the rest of them, his head was pounding. He felt dehydrated, very much like he was hungover but that wasn’t possible. More than anything, though, he was cold. The day may have been mild, but once the sun had gone down, the temperature had apparently dropped dramatically, because he was shivering so hard that he was finding it difficult to get dressed. How he’d managed to sleep through the biting temperatures was beyond him, but now that he was awake, all he could do was rummage through his drawers for the thermal clothes that he’d put away once spring had started and layer them on until he felt as though he could brave the walk to post-op.

In this third-shift situation and when there were so few wounded as there were tonight, sometimes, they cut the staffing down to one doctor in post-op and one nurse, tonight’s being one who didn’t particularly like him, on the floor. Considering that everyone was constantly on call, no one tended to have a problem with this, so the only reason that it even mattered was that it meant that Hawkeye was basically alone and that there was no one to keep him from drifting off. Sleep inertia was a thing, sure, but Hawkeye would argue that this feeling of bone-deep aching and exhaustion went beyond even that. It was becoming difficult to think straight, and he wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t just ask for the night off and sleep off whatever had come over him, but he tried to tell himself that it would only be a few more hours before the sun would rise and he’d be relieved, anyway, so he decided to tough it out. 

The nurse brushing by him and reminding him to get up and check patients’ temperatures and blood pressures were the only thing that kept him from drifting off completely, and even with that, he was pretty sure that she’d caught him dozing a few times but had been too nice to say anything. He wished Margaret were here, he thought. She may be a bully at times, but she also knew the difference between him being lazy and him feeling ill, something that no one else had picked up on yet and that he didn’t want to just come right out and say. The nurse—he might have known who she was at the time, but he couldn’t quite remember now—had given him two aspirin for the headache that was apparently obvious, but she surely thought it was alcohol-related, as it usually was. 

As the hours dragged on, he felt himself feeling more and more run down, now so tired that he had the distinct impression that he was floating, as every movement of his head made the world spin. That didn’t stop nurses from thrusting charts under his nose to sign and approve. He felt a bit irresponsible for not even trying to read them, but he was sure that if he tried to do so, that he’d lose the tentative hold that he had on his stomach contents. God, how did his head still hurt so badly even after taking painkillers? At some point, he decided to sit down in the corner and hope that no one disturbed him again until his shift was over. However, of course that was too much to ask because the next thing he woke up to was the sound of an announcement of incoming wounded.

 

Sleep was arguably the most precious and scarce resource in the war, Charles thought, and he hated to lose out on any of it. Even on a night such as tonight, where everyone was up late and playing cards, he’d only remained in the game because he wasn’t scheduled to work in post-op until late in the afternoon.

Because of those facts, when he woke up a few hours before sunrise to the door of the Swamp being thrown open loudly, he was less than thrilled. 

“What the hell?” BJ muttered, apaprently feeling the same irritation. When Charles’ eyes finally focused from sleep, he could see that Hawkeye was standing in the doorway, leaning heavily against it with one arm and looking hunched over and rushed. 

“Pierce, you’d better have a damned good explanation for waking me at this hour,” he warned. Hawkeye, of course, didn’t bat an eye at the threat. 

“Get up,” he demanded. “We’ve got wounded.” His tone was flat in a way that it normally wasn’t, but it still had BJ and Charles sitting up in their beds immediately. They shot one another a questioning look, but before they could press Hawkeye further, he was already retreating from the Swamp tent and leaving to either wake up more people or to head back toward the OR. 

“You didn’t hear an announcement, did you?” BJ asked, and Charles shook his head, just as he’d suspected. He’d never, no matter how exhausted or how drunk he got, slept through a PA emergency call, but he’d had to ask. 

“If this is another prank,” Charles said as he shrugged into his robe, letting the threat dangle since both of them knew it was empty anyway. 

“I’m sure there’s a good explanation,” BJ reassured blindly. 

By the time they’d gotten themselves composed enough to leave the tent, Hawkeye had already scurried off, but apparently not before waking Klinger, Radar, and Margaret. 

“Morning, fellas,” Klinger greeted sarcastically. Margaret looked livid.

“What’s the big idea?” Radar asked, still so half asleep that he wasn’t even sure if his vision was blurred from sleep or if he’d forgotten his glasses.

“Whatever Hawkeye is pulling, I hope it ends in digging his own grave, because he’s going to need one,” she threatened. Before Charles could agree, BJ shook his head. 

“Look, I’m sure Hawk wouldn’t get us up without good reason,” he reminded them, and even for everything Hawkeye put them through with his pranks and shenanigans, they had to admit that they always knew that ultimately, it was for the sake of boosting morale. Hawkeye knew that if he drove everyone just crazy enough, maybe he could prevent the war from beating him to it. So he’d tell jokes just loud enough to drown out the screams of wounded kid soldiers that they couldn’t do anything for and he’d pull dumb gags just distracting enough to keep them from thinking about anything else. If all eyes were on him, then no one had to look at the hell that surrounded them except for him. 

“Well then, let’s get in there,” Margaret finally took charge, throwing open the door to the operating room and allowing the others to step through it.

 

It soon became clear that there were no wounded soldiers beyond the ones that were resting in post-op. Hawkeye, however, didn’t appear to understand that, standing over an empty table in the operating room, leaning against it on his elbows like he’d run a marathon. 

BJ and Charles looked around the room, then to one another, finally conceding that this hadn’t been a misunderstanding. 

“Okay, Hawk, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt,” BJ began, starting to sound a little angry, “but what the hell are you thinking, waking everyone up for no reason?”

Hawkeye quickly turned an unusually enraged gaze upon the group. “What do you mean, ‘no reason?’” he challenged. “The damn screaming outside isn’t reason enough?” 

At that, the group hesitated. 

“What screaming?” Charles asked, torn between irritated and confused. “The night is perfectly silent, Pierce. Or, rather, it was, before you interrupted it.”

Hawkeye shoved off the table and took a few accusatory steps toward Charles, pointing a finger in his face. 

“You’re gonna pretend you don’t hear that just because you’re tired and don’t want to deal with it?” he demanded. When he swayed on his feet, BJ reached out to steady him but Charles beat him to it, expecting merely to maintain his balance and ending up bearing much of his weight as Hawkeye’s knees buckled. He didn’t go all the way down, pushing his way back to stability against Charles’ chest and regaining his dubiously upright position. 

“Hawkeye, I think you should sit down,” Margaret suggested. She turned to Radar with a serious look on her face. “Perhaps you should wake up Colonel Potter, maybe put in a call to Major Friedman,” she said quietly. However, Radar didn’t move to obey, instead just watched as Charles and BJ had to fight Hawkeye into even just getting him to sit in a chair. 

They’d all had their fair shares of breakdowns, and Hawkeye was no exception. They’d seen him boiling with anger and devastated with sadness and even just so far in his own head that no one could even decipher an emotion to accompany that kind of deep-set trauma and worry. However, in all the years he’d known Hawkeye, if there was one thing that was never a challenge, it was getting him to take a minute to sit down and cool off. No matter how upset or emotional he was, reason always reached him. Now, however, their words didn’t even seem to be landing in his ears, just washing over him as he fought to get back up to operate on imaginary soldiers. 

“We might need to sedate him,” Margaret suggested, and BJ shook his head. 

“Not yet,” he argued, “let’s give him a minute to calm down.” 

“You don’t think he’s taken any kind of drug, has he? Or could have been slipped one without his knowledge?” Charles guessed. 

“I’ve never seen him like this before,” BJ mused, and that sparked a memory so strong that Radar felt the need to interject. 

“Oh, well, I have,” he offered, “once.” All eyes but Hawkeye’s turned to him. “Both of us had only been here a few months, and he did this same thing: ran into the mess hall raving about wounded soldiers and tellin’ everybody to get to work. Only that time, he’d been in the shower, so he was completely naked.” 

BJ frowned. “What was wrong with him?” 

“He had a fever,” Radar recalled, and no sooner had the words come out than was Margaret fishing a thermometer out of her pocket. 

“He’s shivering like he’s feverish,” Charles noted concernedly as BJ pressed a hand to his forehead and cursed.

“Damn it,” he muttered, “he’s burning up.”

“Good catch, Radar,” Klinger commended. It was a several minute fight to get Hawkeye to keep the thermometer in his mouth, constantly tense with the threat of him getting agitated and biting down on the glass, but after what seemed like forever, Charles took it from between his lips and his eyes went wide at the reading. 

“It’s damn near 105 degrees,” he announced. “No wonder he’s delirious.” 

“Hawkeye, you with us?” BJ called. “Do you know where you are?”

“He was fine this morning,” Margaret fretted. “What kind of infection could set in this fast?”

“Do you think he was wounded and didn’t tell us?”

“Appendicitis? Meningitis?” 

“Last time,” Radar offered, “it was malaria.” That news nearly made Margaret drop the thermometer that she was putting back into its sheath, all three sets of eyes focusing intently on Radar. 

“There’s no way he’s had malaria,” BJ dismissed. “He’d have told us.” 

Radar shook his head. “I don’t think he remembers much of it,” he explained, “and what he probably does remember wasn’t exactly pretty.” 

“I’ve always assumed that he was just being a hypochondriac with the prophylactics he takes every month,” Charles admitted, and BJ frowned. 

“And we just had that quinine shortage,” Klinger added.

By this time, Hawkeye had spent all his energy fighting and was leaning his head against Margaret’s chest, but for once, she didn’t fight him off: mostly because she was pretty sure he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. 

“Go wake Colonel Potter,” she commanded, running a gentle hand through Hawkeye’s hair when he winced in pain at the sound of her voice. He was still shivering, which was alarming to the group because it meant that his fever was likely still rising, but they’d dealt with this before. They knew what to do. 

“Let’s get him into a bed in post-op,” BJ commanded. “I don’t think he’s got the energy to fight us off anymore.”

“And if he does?” Charles asked. “With a fever like that, it’s not as if we can sedate him.” In his right mind, this would have been the moment where Hawkeye would have suggested that Margaret lie on top of him to keep him from thrashing, but it spoke to just how out of it he was that he didn’t even react at all. 

“We’ll just hope he doesn’t,” Margaret decided. It was the best answer that they had, so they really didn’t have a choice but to go with it. “Let’s just hope fluids get the fever down to a place where he’s a little more lucid.” 

Radar turned on his heel to alert the Colonel as soon as the medical staff plus Klinger seemed to have everything under control and were all four hauling Hawkeye up onto his feet and to a bed. Even if it were unconscious, something deep inside Hawkeye had known just who he needed to get when he was having a problem, and a small, confusing part of Radar was a little proud that he’d been included in that group. Hawkeye would be okay, he knew, and that was all that mattered. 


End file.
